A television show (LOST) - Essay Example

All of these questions feed into the show’s elaborate mythology. Unlike other TV shows, most of what we want to know about Lost is kept from us, hidden out of sight. That is one of the reasons it has had such a cultural impact. It is a bit like Plato’s cave. We can only see the shadows on the wall and would love to see what on Earth is actually casting them. It has also made all of its cast members into big stars. People identify with these people who are confused about their lives, have no idea where they are, and are seem to be directed by forces they can’t understand.

In Lost, the storytelling shifts between the survivors trying to adapt to their strange new lives and to understand the island on which they are marooned and then shifts to flashbacks that explain us understand the personal history of each of the many character. We get to see what sort of lives they were living before they came to the island. For the most part these are pretty unhappy lives. Lives in which they were also being directed by forces they didn’t really understand either. Some people object to this, wishing instead that they focused exclusively on the events on the island, but I think that this is wrong.

If you focused merely on the events on the island, it would be only an adventure story, but through the flashbacks we learn so much about what makes the people tick that the series becomes as much a character study as an adventure. And this helps us to understand what motivates the characters and lets them stand in for various archtypes. By the end of the season, we get to know the characters so well that we can anticipate how they are going to respond to even the smallest events. We learn very quickly that the island contains a host of mysteries, including invisible monsters whose location and function remain unknown until the end of the first season (if we even understand them then).

There are passageways that lead to strange places, there are promises of